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The Demise of the Fashion Eccentric

The meaning of a true eccentric isn’t in the costume — it’s in the soul.

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Isabella Blow, photographed in 1996, is the subject of a new exhibit, “Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!” at Somerset House in London.Credit
Sean Ellis

Jeremy Langmead tells a memorable story about Isabella Blow. “Imagine the office at News International, all the male journalists sitting around in shirt sleeves,” Langmead says. Now the editor in chief of the online men’s wear retailer Mr Porter, Langmead was the editor who hired Isabella Blow as fashion director of the Sunday Times Style Magazine in London in 1997. “In comes Isabella wearing giant mink antlers sticking out from the top of a coat. It was absolutely about who she was in her soul. At lunchtime she would sit among all the printers, eating her roast beef dressed like that, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.”

The outlandish, deeply unusual former assistant at Vogue who became mentor to a generation of fashion designers, editors and photographers, Isabella Blow is the subject of a new exhibition set amid the Neo-Classical splendor of London’s Somerset House. The surroundings are appropriate, for this is not just a show but an acknowledgement of how her sense of style opened the minds of her peers. She is hereby raised into the pantheon, lauded for the very personal vision that once disgusted the establishment.

Blow was eccentric from her top feathers to the paint that adorned her toes. I used to see her at parties sometimes, and she was a fantastically alarming person; when she smiled, throwing her head back, you saw a sneering mouth so red with lipstick that it was like an open wound. She never seemed like just another one of the fashion crowd: she was a visionary who ripened with new ideas every morning, not every season, and was a genuine muse in a world of phonies.

True eccentrics — the Isabella Blows, the Vivienne Westwoods, the Anna Piaggis and the Stephen Tennants, as if there could ever be more than one of each — are the kind of people whose entire existence is devoted to individuality and innovation. That’s what makes a real eccentric: they really mean it, and they’re willing to suffer for it. Their social function is to explode our preconceptions about what beauty is and what good taste means. Eccentrics raise the bar on the impossible.

Yet, unfortunately, there are a few too many fake ones out there now. These are the imitators, the publicity scavengers, the ones who think it’s merely about fame or attention. They seem to be working not from a brilliant fund of ideas or from a conviction that their outer selves must be used to express a fascinating inner landscape. On the contrary, they’re just showoffs who dress up for the cameras. For people interested in our contemporary times, this is an important distinction: the true eccentric gives us more mystery, more wonder about being human, a new side to beauty, while the faux-eccentric gives us less of everything.

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Clockwise from top left: the writer and actor Quentin Crisp in 1997; the designer and Yves Saint Laurent muse Loulou de la Falaise at her wedding in 1977; the English aesthete Stephen Tennant in 1922; the designer Vivienne Westwood, with devil’s horns, in 2007.Credit
Clockwise from top left: Catherine Karnow/Corbis; Sipa; E.O. Hoppé/Corbis; Jillian Edelstein/Camera Press/Redux.

The point of style, surely, has never been about just sticking on an outfit, or a weird hat, just to get a photograph of yourself on the Internet. There’s nothing startling about these people, except, perhaps, the degree of their conformity to the new media norms. By contrast, every one of Isabella Blow’s outfits was a complete reflection of her psychology and her convictions. Every day for Blow was a struggle for survival. She didn’t care what people thought, and the fakes care about nothing else.

An eccentric who merits the label works from within. I once went to New York and called up the excellent dandy Quentin Crisp. (His number was in the phone book.) He, too, had the jaunty hat and the face emboldened with a ton of slap, but his brilliance was to see how society and its prejudices was a colorful absurdity that people like him could reflect back. He could show you depravity hiding in a business suit, and with a painted finger he could push the moral Anglepoise lamp just so, revealing how false and vain the supposedly “normal” world could be. And there he was, a man who had been spat at and reviled, sitting in the Waverly Restaurant surrounded by people mumbling into their tuna fish sandwiches, occasionally looking up and sniggering at this queer old gentleman wearing blue eye shadow and taking great care not to drop egg on his claret-colored suit.

People like this are like beautiful storytellers, breaking rules you didn’t even know were there, just so you can see better and maybe be better. Life is so full of rules and so full of predictable routines that one can almost forget that art and life depend on spontaneity. Enter the eccentric. No, not you, Little Miss Where’s-the-Camera! And not you, Mr. I-Bought-My-Oddball-Persona-Off-the-Rack. I’m talking about someone like the performance artist, club kid and, latterly, the Lucian Freud model Leigh Bowery, walking around London in the 1980s dressed like a giant exclamation mark, or Penelope Betjeman, the upper-class animal lover, traveler and wit, wishing she could give birth to horses rather than to children. I’m talking about Stephen Tennant arriving in New York on the Berengaria, where he was met, according to his biographer Philip Hoare, by a friend who was quite astonished by his manner and appearance. Tennant came down the gangway in demi-wave and full makeup, holding a small bunch of flowers.

“Pin ’em on!” shouted the customs official, not exactly admiring of the stately English homosexual.

Isabella Blow would have died for her outrageous ideas — and many people maintain that she did. The McQueen frocks and the Philip Treacy hats weren’t what made her eccentric: the meal was the meal Blow made of herself, the phantasmagoric sense of fashion, beauty and invention. With her intelligence and her conviction, she could stare right past your most mundane, fearful self, seeing acres of freedom and possibility around each person. Eccentrics don’t just dress up; they elevate the conversation by revealing, as she did, the places where the conversation hasn’t yet dared to go.

The accessories designer and Yves Saint Laurent muse Loulou de La Falaise was once described as a beauty “held together by gold thread,” and a large part of her eccentricity had to do with a love of fantasy. She could imagine her way out of the normal, and she wanted to drag the audience with her. At her wedding in 1977, according to Vogue, she “dressed as a 16th-century Maharaja in harem pants, sported a turban sprouting a flame-colored aigrette and carried a fistful of beribboned red anemones.”

There are people who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” The faux eccentrics are the latest example of this type, a cynical little tribe indeed. One of the things Isabella Blow saw clearly was that true style isn’t a matter of doing what other people do, or even of doing things first, but of doing things memorably. The same is true of her wonderful kinswomen, like the Italian fashion writer and icon Anna Piaggi, who looked like a walking Picasso, or the decorator Madeleine Castaing, who lived her life as if it was a fairy story, believing that cheetahs, snakes and leopards made good friends and even better carpets. They didn’t always get the life they wanted, but they knew how to dream.

“Fail better” might be the motto of most eccentrics, and I think of it when I contemplate the life of Edith Bouvier Beale, “Little Edie,” cousin of Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill, who was always telling lies and running away, and was featured in the documentary “Grey Gardens.” She only liked men born under the sign of Sagittarius, and eventually she lived in the family house in the Hamptons surrounded by 1,000 bags’ worth of garbage. You wouldn’t say things worked out well for Little Edie, but she was a beautiful woman who went her own way. And maybe that’s the true definition of an eccentric — someone who can’t be slain by what lesser people might say. “I was born with the courage to live,” said Elsie de Wolfe, who is considered America’s first decorator, and who was dyeing her hair blue and doing handstands well into her 70s. “Only those are unwise who have never dared to be fools.”